Encirclement Guaranteed Finite-Time Capture against Unknown Evader Strategies
This addresses the pursuit-evasion problem in robotics or defense, providing a combined encirclement and capture strategy, though it appears incremental by building on prior separate works.
The paper tackles the problem of a group of pursuers capturing a single evader in a 2D unbounded environment while ensuring the evader remains enclosed within their convex hull, without knowledge of the evader's heading angle, and it guarantees finite-time capture with a derived upper bound on capture time.
We consider a pursuit-evasion scenario involving a group of pursuers and a single evader in a two-dimensional unbounded environment. The pursuers aim to capture the evader in finite time while ensuring the evader remains enclosed within the convex hull of their positions until capture, without knowledge of the evader's heading angle. Prior works have addressed the problem of encirclement and capture separately in different contexts. In this paper, we present a class of strategies for the pursuers that guarantee capture in finite time while maintaining encirclement, irrespective of the evader's strategy. Furthermore, we derive an upper bound on the time to capture. Numerical results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed framework against a range of evader strategies.